The FDA is Also Slow at Hiring

One of the reason’s the FDA is too slow to approve new drugs is that as a branch of the Federal government they are tied to slow and inefficient hiring rules.

The Food and Drug Administration has more than 700 job vacancies in its division that approves new drugs, and top officials say the agency is struggling to hire and retain staff because pharmaceutical companies lure them away.

“They can pay them roughly twice as much as we can,” Janet Woodcock, who directs the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), said at a rare-diseases summit recently in Arlington, Va.

High-value, potentially life-saving drugs are being delayed because the FDA is constrained from paying market rates. Absurd. Moreover, it’s not just about the wage rate.

[Janet] Woodcock [Director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research] wrote in December that staffing was a priority in 2016 because the center had “more than 600 staff vacancies.” At the Arlington event, she called the federal hiring system “challenging,” adding that prospective candidates often take other jobs while waiting for the FDA to make an offer.

“We move rather slowly — like a snail might be a better analogy,” agreed Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. “A young person with a family can’t wait four months for us to get through some of the federal hiring process. So if they have something else that’s more . . . expedient, they will take that.”

Sadly, slow and bureaucratic describes not just the hiring process but the drug approval process. The only difference is that patients don’t have an option to take the expedient alternative.

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